Infinite Responsibility - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 131

come to pass, we discover a integrity in the very act of doing justice and
show respect for a sanity that may endure even in the ruins.
It might seem that anyone who could adopt such a practice would
truly have exceeded the limits of self-interest and become something
other than human. But acting in that manner, while exceptional, is not
outside ordinary human experience. Today if someone we love contracts
a terminal illness, we do not abandon that person; on the contrary, we
care and love that person to the biter end. Love's purpose is the person,
not the future. Does it follow that love is somehow religious, that it aims
for transcendental ends? Not at all: love ignores transcendence, too, real-
izing nothing but itself, and as a result constitutes a form of action that
aims beyond the religious or the secular, one that beyond all others real-
izes itself through its own acts. However strange it may sound, then, it
follows that those who practice an apparently impossible ethics enact a
version of this love on another scale.
But even these reflections do not bring us face to face with the most
difficult challenge of all. If we found ourselves in the midst of disaster,
how would we take responsibility for that disaster itself ? Since it would
have arrived thanks to human activity as well as human indifference
about the harm our activity has been doing to the biosphere, we would
have to take the final and unbearable step of accepting the burden of that
failure itself.
Some might do almost anything to avoid taking this step. After all,
they might say, we have done all we could to save the environment, reduc-
ing the harm we do in our own lives and fighting for years to bring about
the necessary actions. No doubt for certain people such a protest could
ring true. Nevertheless, none of us can claim innocence; all of us in devel-
oped societies are implicated in the harm wrought by modern industrial
culture. Our very knowledge of climate change depends on the techno-
logical infrastructure available to contemporary scientists as they do their
research; our very ability to converse about it, to organize activism against
it, relies on modern publishing, communication technology, and forms
of mobility. We couldn't even participate in a movement to save the Earth
without inhabiting the structures we fight against. No doubt it is entirely
understandable that we who endure a horror created by human beings
might be tempted to sink into resentment and anger against others. Such